Ember Cooke

About the Author

I am Gythia of the Vanic Conspiracy, founded in 2004. We are building the RedWood Vanatru tradition, a path of devotional polytheism centered on Freyja, Freyr, and Their kin. I have trained with various Pagan groups, including Hrafnar, Thiasos Bakkheios, and the American Magic Umbanda House. I present and/or staff at events such as PantheaCon, the Bay Area Tarot Symposium, and Many Gods West. I volunteer as a jail chaplain for alternative religions, and hold a BA with honors in religious studies, which I hope to expand towards a Ph.D. in the future.
My personal interests include folklore, feminism, nonbinary gender, polyamory, art, music, and gaming. I am seasonally affective and have neuro-atypical sensory processing, both of which significantly influence my perception of the world, and my spiritual experience. I have lived all my life in the south San Francisco Bay Area.

And now for something completely different! Years ago, when my friend Perlandria lived a couple blocks from me, the two of us regularly found ourselves making up games to play with Tarot cards, just the two of us, or with one or more of our SOs at the time, especially Hobbit (mine), and Paka (hers). She recently reminded me of them, asking if I had the rules for any of them written up. It happens that I DO have those notes from a few different places, so I offer them here to her and to you, for the enjoyment of […]

Last week, the Vanic Conspiracy held our seasonal Trance Devotional ritual. We try to hold these whenever there is a 5th Friday in a month, which happens about 4 times a year. It’s a very convenient interval for honoring a strongly seasonally-influenced pantheon. I believe the ritual went very well. I was worried it might not, however, because I was feeling critically low on spoons. Indeed, as we were gathering to start the ritual, I was downright cranky, and trying (and, I suspect, failing) to avoid taking it out on any of the gathered group. I still led the ritual, […]

Aha! Finally, I have a working desktop computer again! That took weeks longer than I expected it to. It’s been a bit of a rough couple of months for me, tech-wise. My tablet screen shattered. My desktop computer video card died. My phone battery started dying, too. Fun times. But now I have a new phone, my desktop computer is repaired, and I have a plan to replace my tablet, so yay, progress! Even better, I will be going to Ireland soon! So inspired new content is on the way! Love, –Ember–

This is not specific to Paganism. As has been noted before, communities outside the mainstream tend to have more people with a history of abuse, because abuse often drives people away from the mainstream. Pagan communities reflect this reality, so discussions of abuse tend to be particularly relevant to us, even if they don’t specifically address the experience of being a Pagan abuse survivor. I originally worked this out in 2010, talking with friends and going over our respective histories of personal abuse. I made a post to my LiveJournal at the time, with the initial version of this outline. […]

There’s a long standing joke among Wiccans: “How can you tell which is the High Priestess in a coven of witches?” “She’s the one with the broom!” It’s only funny if you get the unspoken visual of said broom being used to physically clean out the space before and after the ritual takes place. In other words, you can tell who the clergy are by who is getting the mundane work done. When I tell people I’m clergy, they almost never ask me what that means in my case or tradition. They tend to assume they know. And much of […]